Do You Trust Keyword Planner?

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The reason I ask, is because I have recently got into a small (At least what I thought was small) niche, and one of the topics, which again, I thought was only a small niche, actually gets close to 100,000 searches per month, from all it's variations and sub topics.

At least that's what Keyword Planner told me.

From my own judgement, I wouldn't say this topic is THAT popular, but apparently it is.

Is KW Planner ever wildly wrong?
 
Keyword planner is wrong very often. Make adwords campaign and you will see what's going on.
 
Gkp is more than unreliable, in many cases it seems intentionally incorrect </conspiracy>. Here's an example I ran into a few days ago.

ginkgo biloba - 74,000 local searches/mo.
buy ginkgo biloba - 90 local searches/mo.

Check it out yourself. That's a significant few deviations away from a normal buyer intent % in the industry.

I've started to lean towards trusting my common sense, analytics data, etc. it seems to work out better. Because there aren't any real comprehensive alternatives, its still useful to get related kw ideas and vague traffic estimates when branching into a new niche.

I've gotten a lot of traffic from keywords estimated at ~100/mo, and little from kws which have high local mo.

Like the philospher Young Jeezy said, "Never trust a Google."
 
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In my case its always good.

And I am also using LongTail Platinum.
 
There is no better alternative.
 
See it is a tool, sometime this kind of problems occurred. After all it is human mad tool and human always do mistakes..
 
The better alternative is to use the keyword tool as an educated guess and not as a hard fact. Once you have enough data from your site's analytics, its easier to see where to push and pull, especially if you've cast a large net of keywords you're trying to rank for. Until then your best bet is the gkp, especially when browsing new niches, etc.

It's hard for me to believe these widespread inaccuracies are a simple mistake, considering how much money Google rakes in from AdWords, and how much data they actively monitor. I could be wrong, but if I am its likely from an intentional neglect of the keyword tool
 
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It's often wrong and it can go both ways - sometimes it shows way too much searches and sometimes way too little.

I use Long Tail Pro mostly but I've heard that the Wealthy Affiliate keyword tool Jaaxy works with a different algorithm and is apparently more accurate than Google Keyword Planner. Don't know how true that is though (could just be marketing spiel). I've tried the free searches using Jaaxy and it does give wildly different estimates to GKP but I haven't actually tested them against each other.
 
I don't trust any tool on 100%. It's not a magic stick. Let's say it is not the worst thing that I've ever seen.
 
change the settings to see the "exact match" search results on gkp. That's more accurate :)
 
There's really no alternative to GKP when it comes to estimating search volumes. It certainly is not accurate, but there's no better alternative.

I really do not think Google has any malicious intent behind this ... even for a company like Google, making accurate estimates of search volumes for billions of phrases is a really, really hard task. But given all of the difficulties involved, I believe they are doing a stellar job.
 
I agree with everyone. Any alternatives to Google...suck. If you're unsure about something, just test it out. If the competition is low, you can run an adwords ad for pennies and see if there is a lot of traffic coming through.
 
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